View report page

75
responsible for less than 20 deaths. Again, inoculation was made
compulsory in the American army in 1911, it having practically abolished
the disease in American stations; in 1913 there were only three cases
of typhoid fever in the entire army, and no deaths. In Japan also
encouraging figures have been obtained. In short, all experience goes
to prove that inoculation against typhoid fever is a most valuable
adjunct to the health of an army. It must not be asserted that it is an
infallible protective—that is to say, that a man who has been inoculated
is proof against infection. That would be adopting a view which
cannot be supported by clinical evidence, and might easily give a false
impression to the general public, and so play into the hands of the
enemies of research. But inoculation does confer a very considerable
degree of immunity against typhoid fever, and the disease in the
inoculated person is of a far milder type than in the unprotected.
These two things would constitute a sufficient cause to urge the free
adoption of the measure. Inoculation, however, does more than this:
it greatly decreases the incidence of the malady.
Medicine is regularly attacked by those quite ignorant of medicine.
In regard to a knowledge of (say) physics, law, or military tactics, the
public at large, as a rule, pay deference to those who have made a lifelong
study of a particular profession, but towards medicine the public
to some extent adopts a different attitude, and upon occasion there is a
reasonable basis in this attitude, for a man has naturally a feeling
towards his body that he has not towards his possessions or his civic
privileges. Medical men who have devoted themselves to the study of
disease, its cause, and prevention, are quite used to being contradicted
by the timid, sentimental and ignorant and as a rule only resent the
treatment when the general health of the community is in question.
Consequently faddists are listened to and believed who have had no
opportunities of studying the intricate problems of morbid processes,
and their opinions are quoted seriously against those of members of the
medical profession who have devoted long years to special work.
If a man contracts typhoid fever he is a danger not only to himself
but to those who are associated with him.
Some inconvenience for a day or two is nothing as compared with
an attack of typhoid fever. To undergo an infinitesimal or a negligible
risk in order to help to keep an army healthy is what is required, and
all that is required from any recruit. No words can be too strong in
condemnation of those who seek under the guise of patriotism to exploit
their own fads, founded upon ignorance, upon our prospective troops to
the detriment of the future of the nation.